John Nemeth <jnemeth%cue.bc.ca@localhost> writes: > BTW, disklabels were released with 4.3BSD-Tahoe, which was > released in June 1988 (28 years ago). There were plenty of versions > of BSD prior to that which didn't support disklabel. The first > release of BSD was in 1977, so it took 11 years for disklabel to > come about. In 1988, an 80MB HD would have been huge and probably > not available for the type of machines that BSD ran on. With 80MB This is a memory lane trip. In 1988, I was using a MicroVax II, and I think it had 8 MB of RAM and 80 MB would have been about right for disk, but maybe it was 40 MB. IIRC this machine cost about $20000. I dimly remember a 320 MB drive coming with the MicroVax III that arrived around 1990. But regardless of such nits, you are totally correct about the orders of magnitude between the disks of the time and the disklabel limit. > HDs, you would need 25,000 of them to make 2TB, which means 2TB > was unfathomable. Given the constraints of the time, disklabel > was a reasonable format. However, time tends to blow away all > constraints. I at first reacted that you couldn't be right about disklabels because I think I remember that a Sixth Edition system I used in 1977 had multiple partitions, of the familiar a/b/d/e layout that we use today. This was on an RK05 that was 2.5MB for each of two disk drives. But then I remembered that the partition tables were *compiled into the kernel* and that's why disklabels were such a huge step forward.
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